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Businesses are Suffering

By Scott Sumner | Apr 19 2025
Almost any economic change produces winners and losers.  Ride share companies hurt the taxi industry.  In the future, Waymo may undercut the ride share companies.  Imports of inexpensive sneakers from China hurt the US shoe making industry.  And now we discover that San Francisco’s recent crackdown on street crime also produces negative consequences for some businesses: ...

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Trade as a Scapegoat

By Scott Sumner | Apr 13 2025

I’ve noticed that many people reflexively blame trade for the decline of the Rustbelt.  Here’s one example: Apologists for the outgoing trade regime often ignore that its impact was felt most acutely in particular regions, like the American Midwest. Researchers John Russo and Sherry Linkon describe how the closure of a steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio – the .. MORE

Featured Comment

Given that the original antitrust laws were vague in their original language, antitrust officials and the courts have often relied on economists and economic literature for guidance. As far as I’m aware, there is no..

nobody.really, April 9

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Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings

Introducing Fewer Rules, Better People: The Case for Discretion

By Kevin Corcoran | Apr 22, 2025 | 2

Ideas can often be introduced to us in unusual places. The British comedian David Mitchell once quipped that his introductions to Proust and Wagner came from Monty Python and Bugs Bunny respectively. In my own life, I was first motivated to think about the argument over the relative value of rules and discretion while watching .. MORE

Economics of Health Care

Health Care Markets Fail So Government Must Intervene? Kenneth Arrow Said No Such Thing

By Michael Cannon | Apr 22, 2025 | 2

We’ve all heard the ritual incantation: Kenneth Arrow showed that markets fail in health care, so government must intervene. What comes next is dealer’s choice. You may be in for a pitch on regulating nurse practitioners. Or against physicians dispensing medicines. Or for price controls on pharmaceuticals. Or for abolishing profit, private health insurance, and human nature itself on .. MORE

Trade Barriers

The Trade Debate Revisited

By Scott Sumner | Apr 21, 2025 | 5

Within the Trump administration there is a vigorous debate between two camps.  One group, headed by Peter Navarro, might be called the “true believers”.  They favor mercantilist economic policies of the sort that Argentina implemented during the 1940s and 1950s.  Another group, headed by Elon Musk, might be called the free traders.  In the middle .. MORE

Economic History

Of ChatGPT’s Sense of Humor

By Pierre Lemieux | Apr 21, 2025 | 11

Over more than two years, I have occasionally discussed my experience with AI bots—mainly ChatGPT, which I have also used for the featured images of my posts. But except in “TikTok, Godot, Absurd Politics, and Knaves,” I have not directly addressed this bot’s sense of humor, which has become rather impressive. Let me give other .. MORE

Cross-country Comparisons

My Weekly Reading for April 20, 2025

By David Henderson | Apr 20, 2025 | 9

US Citizens Don’t Have First Amendment Rights If Noncitizens Don’t by David J. Bier, Cato at Liberty, April 15, 2025. Excerpt: I just had a disturbing conversation with a green card holder—a legal permanent resident of the United States. He had asked if he thought traveling internationally was wise for him as someone who has .. MORE

Cost-benefit Analysis

Free Stuff is Expensive

By Art Carden | Apr 20, 2025 | 7

There is an endless list of ways we want to improve cities and help the poor. The list of problems plaguing poor communities is long. Every major US city has areas where the schools are terrible, crime is rampant, the sidewalks and streets are little more than rubble, fresh food is in short supply, and .. MORE

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Bloggers David Henderson, Alberto Mingardi, Scott Sumner, Pierre Lemieux, Kevin Corcoran, and guests write on topical economics of interest to them, illuminating subjects from politics and finance, to recent films and cultural observations, to history and literature.

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Book Club

Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings

What is the Role of the Expert? 31

Commenting on this post, commentor Warren Platts writes (emphasis added): You economists can debate amongst yourselves about how trade deficits don’t matter. But your debates  are what don’t matter now. Now we need to just get this done, come hell or high water. Your job now, as an experienced economist, is to tell us how .. MORE

Cross-country Comparisons

My Weekly Reading for April 20, 2025 9

US Citizens Don’t Have First Amendment Rights If Noncitizens Don’t by David J. Bier, Cato at Liberty, April 15, 2025. Excerpt: I just had a disturbing conversation with a green card holder—a legal permanent resident of the United States. He had asked if he thought traveling internationally was wise for him as someone who has .. MORE

International Trade

Public Statement in Favor of Free Trade and Against Tariffs 35

  America’s prosperity is today, as it has always been, rooted in principles of entrepreneurship and voluntary economic exchange. For 250 years, the United States of America has demonstrated to the world that a people left free to innovate and produce for themselves, and for all who trade with them, will enjoy increasing abundance, higher .. MORE

Book Reviews and Suggested Readings

The Human Moral Mind

By Arnold Kling

Experiments consistently reveal that our moral judgments are driven by perceptions of harm. We condemn acts based on how much they seem to victimize someone vulnerable. —Kurt Gray, Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground1 (page 8) In his book, Outraged, Kurt Gray studies the psychology of moral .. MORE

Economic Thought Experiments

By Arnold Kling

Perhaps the oddest thing of our soon-to-be present is that while the Americans revel in their petty, internal squabbles, they will barely notice that elsewhere !!! Lights will flicker and go dark. Famine’s leathery claws will dig deep and hold tight. Access to the inputs—financial and material and labor—that define the modern world will cease .. MORE

Rights, Restrictions, and Reality: 50 Years of Anarchy, State, and Utopia

By Aeon Skoble

Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia was released in 1974, shortly after (and partly in response to) his Harvard colleague John Rawls’ 1971 A Theory of Justice. Anarchy, State, and Utopia included a theory of rights and a right-based account of liberalism in the classic tradition, which offered an alternative not only to Rawls’ progressive .. MORE

In Search of Stable Money

By Arnold Kling

Under a gold standard, government bonds are nearly free of inflation risk but not of default risk. Under a fiat standard, the reverse is true. ——White, Lawrence H. Better Money: Gold Fiat or Bitcoin? (pp. 214-215).1 In his new book, Lawrence H. White compares three possible monetary systems: a gold standard, a fiat money standard, .. MORE